Like marmite mashed together with peanut butter, the carrier sandwich of a smartphone with pay as you go doesn’t make much sense. Smartphones, after all, are mostly used for their data capabilities, and you can’t buy pay-as-you-go data down at your local 7-11; I’ll never remember the time I popped a USA pay-as-you-go SIM into my iPhone and watched the $20 balance drain to zero in less than ten minutes, even without any data applications running. There’s a reason smartphones require a data plan.

Which is what makes T-Mobile’s announcement of the first “pay as you go” Android smartphone, the Pulse, so interesting. Available for 180 pounds in October exclusively through T-Mobile UK, the specs are fine: a 3.5 inch HVGA touchscreen display — which is apparently the biggest yet on an Android device — coupled with a 3.2 megapixel camera and a Telenvav GPS. It also features a trackball, 2GB of internal memory and a micro SD slot for expansion.

The question is: why bother? Is T-Mobile UK also rolling out an attractive “pay as you go” data plan to go with the Pulse? Or is the Pulse as it appears: a smartphone without a 3G radio chip, an internet smartphone only when slurping up WiFi? There’s probably a market for that amongst pay as you go customers, eager for a fancier and more capable phone without the requirement of subscribing to a data plan. We’ll have to see if T-Mobile scratches their itch.